Sébastien Grosjean's coding blog

Just a few references to help you boost your spec suites. Got 50% - 70% speed boost for BookingSync test suite.

• Inspect with perftools.rb
• Lower BCrypt Cost
• Deferer Garbage Collection

References:

http://blog.syncopelabs.co.uk/2012/12/speed-up-rspec-test.html
http://makandracards.com/makandra/950-speed-up-rspec-by-deferring-garbage-collection
http://blog.carbonfive.com/2011/02/02/crank-your-specs/

Updated 2014-09-17: Recommend Tunnelss (extra 's') instead of Tunnels to provide valid certificate for .dev domains. (Use carefully, .dev is now a legitimate TLD)

I'm using Pow for running Ruby on Rails Apps in development. One thing not provided by Pow but important to me, is the ability to use SSL in development. For this, I use Tunnelss

Once setup, you'll need to make it run everytime you start your computer, and on OS X Mavericks using rbenv, this can be done by creating the following file:

/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.rubygems.tunnelss.plist

Make sure to adjust the tunnels path to your system

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
  <key>Label</key>
  <string>org.rubygems.tunnelss</string>
  <key>ProgramArguments</key>
  <array>
    <string>/Users/seb/.rbenv/shims/tunnelss</string>
  </array>
  <key>RunAtLoad</key>
  <true/>
  <key>UserName</key>
  <string>root</string>
</dict>
</plist>

Rails 3.1+ and the Asset Pipeline is excellent to minify, merge, and deliver assets, however it's good to also leverage browser caching.

Using nginx, you can set a far future expiration header like this:

server {
  location ~ ^/(assets)/ {
    expires max;
  }
}

Updated: February 28th 2012 to fix a typo in the translation file. Thanks erwin.

Starting to work with Twitters Bootstrap I have to make few adaptation to my simple_form setup to keep having clean forms and benefit from the slick interface provided by Twitter Bootstrap.

The tweaks required takes 2 parts:

1. The setup for input wrappers and form classes, ...
2. The buttons wrappers to be added easily

Setup for input wrappers and form classes, ...

Most of the work can be done by generating your simple_form config with as describe on simple_form documentation

rails generate simple_form:install --bootstrap

I had to make a few extra tweaks to use the horizontal mode, that I prefer:

config.label_class = 'control-label'
config.form_class = 'simple_form form-horizontal'

That's now good for all except the submit buttons, I'm still not happy to define the whole submit wrapper on each form, so let's make a button wrapper

Buttons wrappers

Adding the following to a new library, for example /lib/extras/simple_form_extensions.rb:

module WrappedButton
  def wrapped_button(*args, &block)
    template.content_tag :div, :class => "form-actions" do
      options = args.extract_options!
      loading = self.object.new_record? ? I18n.t('simple_form.creating') : I18n.t('simple_form.updating')
      options[:"data-loading-text"] = [loading, options[:"data-loading-text"]].compact
      options[:class] = ['btn-primary', options[:class]].compact
      args << options
      if cancel = options.delete(:cancel)
        submit(*args, &block) + ' ' + I18n.t('simple_form.buttons.or') + ' ' + template.link_to(I18n.t('simple_form.buttons.cancel'), cancel)
      else
        submit(*args, &block)
      end
    end
  end
end
SimpleForm::FormBuilder.send :include, WrappedButton

will allow you to use :

<%= f.button :wrapped, :cancel => posts_path %>

Don't forget to load your new library, I like to use the following way from config/application.rb :

config.autoload_paths += %W(#{config.root}/lib/extras)

And require it from config/initializers/simple_form.rb

require 'simple_form_extensions'

Last thing, add the new translations within config/locales/simple_form.en.yml

en:
  simple_form:
    creating: "Creating..."
    updating: 'Updating...'
    buttons:
      or: 'or'
      cancel: 'cancel'

Restart your app server and here we go, we now keep the really clean way to manage forms of simple_form with the beautiful design of Twitter Bootstrap.

Register the TSV Mime Type

in `config/initializers/mime_types.rb` register the TSV mime type

Mime::Type.register "text/tab-separated-values", :tsv

Add to_csv and to_tsv to Arrays so as CSV and TSV renderers

In `lib/csv_and_tsv_renderers.rb`

# encoding: utf-8
#
require 'csv' # adds a .to_csv method to Array instances
class Array
  BOM = "\xEF\xBB\xBF" #Byte Order Mark UTF-8
  alias old_to_csv to_csv #keep reference to original to_csv method
  def to_csv(options = Hash.new)
    options = options.merge(:force_quotes => true)
    # override only if first element actually has as_csv method
    return old_to_csv(options) unless self.first.respond_to? :as_csv
    # use keys from first row as header columns
    out = first.as_csv.keys.collect{|k| k.to_s.titleize }.to_csv(options)
    # collect all entries as CSV, ensure that no line break is present within values
    self.each { |r| out << r.as_csv.values.to_csv(options).gsub(/\r?\n/, ' ').strip! + "\n" }
    # Force encoding to UTF-16LE and add Byte Order Mark for Excel compatibility
    (BOM + out).force_encoding("UTF-8")
  end
  def to_tsv(options = Hash.new)
    to_csv(options.merge(:col_sep => "\t"))
  end
end
ActionController::Renderers.add :csv do |csv, options|
  csv = csv.respond_to?(:to_csv) ? csv.to_csv() : csv
  self.content_type ||= Mime::CSV
  self.response_body = csv
end
ActionController::Renderers.add :tsv do |tsv, options|
  tsv = tsv.respond_to?(:to_tsv) ? tsv.to_tsv() : tsv
  self.content_type ||= Mime::TSV
  self.response_body = tsv
end

Load the lib

In `config/initializers/load_libs.rb`

require 'csv_and_tsv_renderers'

In your models

Cherry pick the attributes you like to be exported

def as_csv(options = {})
  csv = {
    attribute_1: attribute_1,
    ...
  }
end

In your controllers

respond_to do |format|
  ...
  format.csv  { send_data @objects.to_csv(), :filename => "nice_filename.csv" }
  format.tsv  { send_data @objects.to_tsv(), :filename => "nice_filename.tsv" }
end

References

http://blog.plataformatec.com.br/2009/09/exporting-data-to-csv-and-excel-in-your-rails-app/

https://github.com/ilmotta/to-csv/issues/3

http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/ruby_19s_string

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/539294/how-do-i-determine-file-encoding-in-osx

Update 2012-01-28

Use UTF-8 everywhere instead of the initial UTF-8 BOM then forcing to UTF-16LE. Seems to work fine under Windows' Office 2010.

If you could confirm that it works properly under an other version, opens fine and shows diacritics characters, please leave a comment bellow.